I’m No Better

Attending high school in the early 1970s in Anchorage, Alaska, I joined the East High School choir because I wasn’t good enough for much else in terms of extra-curricular activities. I just barely qualified to sing with the baritones. I was never really part of the choir socially, but they let me sing with them. I gained more than I gave, for sure.

We had a festival my junior year, hosted by the big rival across town, West High. Not that rivalry mattered much to us, but the school had more money, thus better facilities. The festival had us present our best and we were scored in some fashion I hardly remember, but it was vaguely competitive among a half-dozen area schools. The supposed highlight was a training session from a real serious conductor. He taught us to sing a few numbers as a massed choir. I remember two things — (1) the kids mostly reacted with mass resentment, and (2) one of the songs had an ending which stuck in my head.

After all these years, I decided to look up the lyrics and see if I could identify the piece. The lyrics were the poem by Thomas Hornsby Ferril, No Mark. The music was by Cecil Effinger, one of his “Four Pastorals” by the same name as the poem. I recalled the part at the end:

O swing away, white gull, white gull,
Evening star, be beautiful.

I can still sing it.

The sad part of all this is it was all I remembered. I never understood the reference to Chancellorsville, though I seem to recall the guest conductor told us something about the song. As far as I know, I was so deeply wrapped in my own little world, I paid no attention. And I was one of those who resented him, anyway. I remember the antipathy we all had for each other, too, it seems. I suppose being smart-aleck brats then is hardly different from today. I was just one of them, but with only half their talent, so I didn’t say much.

When I see a world falling down around me ears, I know somewhere along the way some of that mess bears my finger prints. I see it now, of course, and weep. I’m still out of place, fitting in no where, with no particular crowd I have encountered. Utterly without any sense of superiority, I see the same crazy headlong rush to ruin which has characterized the US since it began, at places like Chancellorsville. Everyone around me it seems is in on that resentment — things just don’t go the way they should, but no one’s really paying attention to the beauty of things which could be.

I missed the window, and I see it now too late. Most of the world sees about as well as I did then, all wrapped within themselves. They don’t have 40 years to escape.

Medical Death System

We don’t have “health care” in the US; not really. What we have is a tightly controlled delivery system for pharmaceutical companies for the sake of unconscionable profits which help to destroy our economy. Yes, we can blame the mortgage bubble, and the commercial real estate bubble, but there are a few other bubbles which constitute the same fraud where someone in private business gets government to hold a gun to our heads and force us to pay them.

While I don’t agree with the notion we can fix government and make it behave, and especially can we not use government to make others behave — unless we wipe it all away and start from scratch — I heartily recommend this review of the situation from Alternet. This summarizes neatly the pervasive nature of influence buying by Big Pharma. The various major pharmaceutical firms compete only in who gets to stake out the turf first on a particular drug. Otherwise, they collude on price fixing and regulation buying, along with perverting the entire medical field so it’s just a delivery mechanism for their products.

And it only keeps getting worse.

Yes, a few doctors remain who care and actually practice medicine as the high art it should be. Good luck finding them. That business of 100K deaths per year is not just made up, either. There have been several studies pointing this out, and links can be found in the comments attached to the article at Alternet.

Unix Tools on Windows

I still had my old XP license, so I installed it on my spare hard drive. The reason I care at all is, as everyone knows, drivers. Linux drivers for some things are just great, but even HP can’t create a proper HPLIP driver for CUPS which prints as nicely as it does in Windows. Having tried it repeatedly with different distros of Linux, it always prints a little too low on the page, and I can’t find any way to adjust that. Then there’s that business with the on-board Intel-HDA sound chipset which always clicks and pops under Linux, and not a one of the various manual adjustments works to fix the jack sensing so plugging in my headphones kills the speakers. And on and on it goes. After awhile it just gets tiresome.

So I reinstalled XP and all is dandy, except I was still jonesing for the CLI tools in Unixland. Thank God for GnuWin32. For my personal use, it was enough to grab the basic core utilities, along with units, and the file command to ID stuff in my browser cache. These are the things I use most.

In a similar vein, after my discussion on grabbing videos from your browser cache, playing with the Firefox add-on which downloads and converts media files, the author wanted money for some of the critical features. I have no problem with that, but I also have no money. Besides, that constantly animated icon on the mainbar at the top of Firefox drove me nuts. So I went and found this wonderful page on ffmpeg and related tools for Windows. There are several GUI frontends for it, and you’ll have to make up your own mind. I am prepared to do it on the CLI, so converting FLVs to MP4 or stripping the audio file down to MP3 is pretty easy to do, once you find a decent recipe. However, just for fun, I decided to test the one labeled Super from eRightSoft. It comes bundled with a reasonably recent copy of the ffmpeg backend, and appears to work well enough.

As you might expect, I’m also using Cream/Gvim for Windows — yes, I actually use Gvim quite a bit without the Cream — and other nifty things like Really Slick Screensavers, PuTTy, and stuff like that. Naturally, you gotta have that AV package, and I keep a homesite license to Sunbelt VIPRE because I can scrape up just enough every year to renew it. That way I can run it on as many Win-boxes as I have in my immediate family.

Killer Solitaire Package: PySolFC

For quite some years I have been a fan of PySol. If any particular Linux distro dropped it, I dropped that distro. Eventually it seemed to have disappeared. But no, it was rescued by it’s own fan club, so to speak.

You can download it again, and it’s better than ever. All it really takes on Linux/BSD is a recent developer version of Python. On Windows, all it takes is downloading and installing. Best of all the Windows version comes with some peaceful background music.

There are more card games in this package than you are likely to ever play. What are you waiting for?

What Does It Take to Keep You Distracted?

The basic theory of conspiracy is people will pull together in secrecy to oppose and take advantage of the majority who are outside the conspiracy. Thus, the smaller group conspires to rule, in one way or another. It need not be total domination, only in things the conspiracy wants to dominate. Moderate goals are usually far more successful than overreach. Most people who are smart enough to pull off a conspiracy are smart enough to know what they can get away with. Overall, the theory of conspiracy is the single best explanation of all human history at large.

The best conspiracies are based not on simple secrecy, but misdirection. Keeping the attention of the outsiders directed to something — anything — other than the conspiracy is the best hope for success. Often the misdirections are planned, cooked up by the conspirators. However, if the background of life contains enough information output, it is a simple matter of feeding misdirection through the medium to which everyone is already giving their attention. These days, it’s a simple matter of adding a false thread to the busy media output, or latching onto some real event and blowing it out of proportion. These misdirections may be truly nasty things, indeed, bigger and worse than the conspiracy, but it can still serve the conspirators’ purpose.

At the same time, wise watchers realize there are, at any given time, dozens of conspiracies which aim to control different slices of the world. They may or may not compete. Most simply overlap in one way or another. If the background of the mainstream world is already distracted and misled by several different major conspiracies, what’s one more? Little conspiracies, with limited goals, tend to succeed more often and far longer than bigger stuff.

Every government in history, with a few exceptions, has been a conspiracy. Various actors on the big stage of history have injected into the stream of events certain structured efforts to obtain and hold control over certain things, for certain gains. Frankly, the greatest conspirator of all is Satan. Second to Him is God. God rules without the necessity of conspiracy, because He is God, but has at times conspired with men of His choosing to grant them control over various portions of His Creation. The word “portions” includes an awareness of the fourth dimension, so that they all had a distinct lifespan. Only a tiny few ever consciously included God in their plans, and most of those really didn’t understand Him that well. Most conspiracies are actively, if not consciously, against God’s designs. That’s where the Devil comes in, as the original Conspirator against God. What makes God a conspirator is how He retains the initiative in everything, including revealing Himself. He is always right, so we tend not to think of it as conspiracy, because it is benign. The word “conspiracy” need not always be paired with evil; rather, it is defined by a lack of awareness by the majority involved.

All of that to say this: The Gulf Oil Disaster is shot through with conspiracies, many of them competing. The exploration itself was contrary to good science. The drilling operation was a conspiracy of cutting corners to reduce expense and raise profit. The response by everyone involved was multiple conspiracies. The Coast Guard conspired to retain bureaucratic control at all costs, even to human life. BP conspired to lie so they would not be pressured to do much about it, since doing anything costs money. Frankly, the folks at the top would have simply said, “Oops! Sorry.” Then they would have walked away, were there no government to coerce them. It hits their pocket book, so they play along, but only as long as they can’t profit from doing otherwise. They have continued trying to cover up the extent of the damage, and conspire to deceive the public on their utter lack of interest in cleaning up the mess. To this day, they fight every step of the way paying a dime for the damage. They have hired the absolute minimum of people, doing nothing that really matters, when the real effort is trying to get as much salvageable oil as possible, nothing more. Meanwhile, the US government has conspired to keep people ignorant, since panic means they aren’t in control. They have conspired in part with BP to hide the extent, as have other levels of local government. So we have civil policemen enforcing the wishes of BP where there is no law to cover their wishes, and even when the law is contrary to BP’s wishes — cops arresting people on public property, or their own private property, when they dared to record the piddling make-a-show efforts at recovery.

On another level, there are other forces at work with a much more global reach, hoping to capitalize on this disaster. Indeed, anything at all which grabs the public imagination is a good thing for these shadowy forces, because that means less time for folks to investigate the really big conspiracies. If you don’t believe in those bigger conspiracies, don’t bother reading my blog. Just watch TV and drink your koolaid. Satan is wrong, but he’s far more intelligent than anything walking on this earth. His best servants are those headed for the greatest destruction, as he protects no one at all but himself. Indeed, there is a sense in which part of his punishment for the Fall is not being able to operate in his own best interest. So everything he makes of people is a reflection of himself, but without his power and intelligence. He knows his goose is cooked, and he conspires to keep his servants from knowing that, as wells as their own fates. There most certainly are highly intelligent fools who seek to control all the world, but they do so incrementally, with vast patience.

Yes, these people are willing to take advantage of the Gulf Disaster, and just about everything else you watch on TV, and will allow a limited discussion of their own activities, so long as they get to write the story. Eventually it will blow up in their faces, but in the process they will ensnare most of the human population of earth in one more level of misery not already pressing in upon us by default since the day Satan suckered Eve in the Garden of Eden. These shadowy folks who currently hold most of the reins of humanity in their hands probably aren’t thrilled with the oil disaster, but won’t waste the opportunity to further their plans. They’ll continue manipulating BP, the US government and local governments, the mass media, and so on, while they pull off something otherwise difficult to hide. They work through the Bilderbergers, the G8/G20, the UN, and a lot of other agencies, but are not confined to them. Strict and utter control is not necessary, but making you believe it is necessary is part of the big lie. Alternatively, making you afraid to believe any part of the truth about them is also part of the scheme. A tiny handful with the truth against them are not much of a threat, so keeping everyone else distracted by whatever means necessary is good enough. They know this.

Even Satan is unlikely to know exactly what constitutes sufficient numbers of people figuring this out and refusing to cooperate. God alone knows that, not to mention His plans to use “natural forces” to keep those shadowy forces in check. Just how much these folks have calculated is probably impossible to measure, but it won’t matter, because God knows and does what He wishes regardless of their plans. But the problem for us is just how vastly evil are their plans and how the wrath of God falls upon each cycle of human conspiracy, as each grows increasingly larger and more complete in their plans to rule all mankind. There is a sense in which this is the same old conspiracy at work in the ancient empires of times past, receding back into time before recorded history. That’s because it’s the same Devil behind it all, and the nature of the beast never changes.

Yes, weep and mourn the loss in the Gulf. In many ways, things will never, ever be the same. Frankly, I half expect to see millions displaced, if not dead. Countless non-human lives have already been lost to it, and that is only the beginning. The economy for the rest of us will also be crushed even more than it was already. We cannot imagine what the pollutants will do in the years to come, but we can be sure it will be painful on a scale not yet seen in recorded history. Yes, this is on the scale of Apocalypse, even if this isn’t quite the thing itself.

See it; recognize it. Know that it will touch your life, as it will the whole of humanity. This is one huge Pandora’s Box, and there’s no going back. But it need not stop you from doing what is right. Perhaps you could continue on faithfully walking in the Spirit without knowing any of this, but I am certain our Father intends us to pay attention to everything around us. That is, the idea is not to know and fear, but to know and not fear. We learn more so that we may conquer yet one more lie. The oil disaster is a fact, but it’s also a ton of lies. Know it for what it is.

Even in Oklahoma: Thugs in Uniform

This is the nature of things in our nation today. Generally the police forces in Oklahoma, you would think, aren’t given to the unspeakable outrages we see in so many other places. Think again.

“Don’t Taze My Granny!” shows even some sleepy places like El Reno can offer the most unspeakable stupidity among uniformed officers. Granted, it’s possible this article exaggerates things, but I rather doubt that. Cops are becoming the greatest danger to average citizens everywhere. Who needs terrorists when we have state thugs in uniform?

Advertising and Marketing Are Utterly Evil

When I need something, and have some money to spend, but don’t know where to find something suitable, I ask someone I trust. Should I find something advertised, I will tend to think it’s probably the worst there is. If it was any good, no one would have to advertise it.

At least, they wouldn’t be using modern methods. What we have today is the summation of a long path to ever more manipulative efforts. Look up people like Edward Bernays and you’ll learn it was all about doing everything possible to deceive people so the only thoughts they have on a subject are the lies which profit his client.

Humans are fallen, vulnerable to lusts and temptations. The Bible makes it clear you will not keep God’s favor if you take advantage of weakness in your fellow humans. That advertising works is hardly any justification. The idea we must do all we can to pump up the market volume with tons and tons of useless crap nobody really needs, just because there is some possibility of getting them to pay for it, shows a complete and conscious rejection of God’s Word. This is a critical part of why God is destroying the modern West, in particular the US, a nation founded on manipulative marketing lies.

There are a few individuals here and there who seem to have a certain modicum of conscience on this, and their marketing is restrained. Indeed, a tiny handful get it. That is, they understand the only rightful way to obtain the attention of their potential market is to offer something which justifies their attention. The product must meet a genuine human need. That standard alone makes the vast majority of products useless, even evil, because most of what we consume offers a well established record of harm: high fructose corn syrup, empty sweet or fat calories devoid of nutritional value, fluoridation, false health claims (mainstream medicine is a big fat lie), plain old government propaganda, etc. “Just giving them what they want!” That’s a lie. It’s going out of your way to find out what triggers the general human lust and selling trash as the answer to their desires. Precious few understand you have a moral obligation to earn that hearing and seeing.

The best advertisers will actually entertain, and don’t confuse entertainment with deception. They tell the truth while presenting something of good moral value in entertaining the prospective buyer. If all you care about is dollars in your pocket, you are evil. If you care about people and their needs, and are willing to do the work, you will do fine in the competitive market place. But it’s so rare these days, we always remember them gratefully. This against, say, the flashing bright colors of banner ads which won’t sit still. Yes, annoying people makes your pitch memorable, but people justly hate you and your painful death at their hands would not disappoint God one bit.

Sure, the foregoing is a lot of platitudes. If I were to start naming names, it would only divert attention over the nit-picking details. The whole point is to remind folks the biblical standard is honesty. That includes the notion you don’t take yourself too seriously, nor your products and services. Honest folks are simply asking for a chance to compete on whatever grounds, letting the buyer decide what matters to them, not trying to manipulate them.

No, God forbid anyone should have to regulate these things. Our cultural legacy, thin as it is, offers no moral restraints which are based in reality. The only effective restraint on human evil is voluntary self-restraint, backed up by a cultural frame of reference which encourages such restraint. Our is utterly false in assumptions about what is real, just and right. Thus, our sins are egregious, our restraints totally inappropriate, and the result is so offensive to God, we wonder why it took Him so long to destroy it all.

So let’s boil it down to this: If someone has to spend a lot of money to get your attention for their stuff, chances are you need to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can. Develop a web of trust among people who, as a group, have sampled the broad range of things out there. All the more so if they have nothing to gain by telling you, aside from your continued trust. Everything else is manipulation, and that is reason enough by itself to reject their claims.

Improbable Dreams of Oppression

Governments are typically built by intelligent people, but always slip into the hands of the merely crafty. Precious great people appear in the history of human government. Modern governments are probably worse than ever in this respect. Sometimes we are amazed at the ignorance.

So Australia published a government study which recommends everyone be forced to install a government-approved AV and firewall package. The implication is probably not too far from what Paul Joseph Watson alleges, though he does engage some hyperbole. The document itself is breathtaking in its ignorance, for anyone with a little knowledge of how the Internet works.

I have just a little, and I can just about figure this would not be possible without a vast amount of funding. You see, enforcement is by far the most impossible part of this, and the lack of understanding shows what happens when you ask government people what to do, instead of folks who actually know how it works. This would require each ISP to implement a procedure for checking each connected device for the presence of that AV-firewall package. That alone is virtually impossible.

The biggest issue is by what means would the ISP scan for that package? Get this: I can in theory write some software for my computer which would then deceive the ISP scanning computer, and they would not have a clue. They are wholly unlikely to want that clue, because it means a very heavy line use every time the device connects, or reconnects. And if the customer uses a home router for multiple computers, how is the ISP to know when said router hasn’t been programmed to run interference on behalf of all the systems? And let’s not forget how easy it is to allow other computers to run through yours via wifi. The ISP won’t give a rat’s patootie, but will be forced to carry out this demand from government in order to do business legally.

So what if they run Linux, BSD, or any number of other operating systems which have their own firewall built in, and there are no viruses, nor even AV for them? Linux users have fought that mess at colleges, because the administration of most of them is brain-dead on a par with government bureaucrats. How will said government idiots propose to enforce compliance? And how will it play out in the long run, in actual user experience?

I don’t doubt the people who came up with this brilliant plan would willingly go around holding a gun to people’s heads, making them run Windows, just so they could all run the exact some software package so the crackers don’t have to work so hard to get past it. They will, of course. And forcing everyone to run Windows just guarantees there will be even more infected systems polluting the Net.

Of course, we know the real reason for all this is to force everyone into a mold which simplifies the life for bureaucrats. Uniformity means less work for the over-paid hogs at the public trough. They love enforced uniformity. Bureaucrats hate the common Joe finding out things they didn’t tell him. So it’s just another thinly disguised attempt at hateful oppression.

In my opinion, this is the sort of thing which justifies armed revolt.

Naming and Shaming: Criminal Registrars

Not only do I lack the expertise, but I am not in a position to get it. But I deeply respect those who are willing to name names and shame the guilty in public. KnujOn (that’s “No Junk” backwards) is an anti-spam group seeking to raise the bar of self-policing on the Internet. After an exhaustive review of registrars, they report just which ones [PDF] are protecting their criminal clients, making themselves knowing accessories to crime.

I haven’t had a chance to plow through it, and frankly I would not recognize most of the names. What I found missing is how ICANN is too darned lazy to do their job and enforce their own policies. Even an act of Congress won’t fix it. All this does if ensure we allow the Nanny State just one more excuse for taking over the Internet — or at least trying.

Thanks to Sunbelt Blog, who bring you VIPRE Anti-Virus (which I recommend highly), for pointing out this fine report.

Christian Mysticism and Poverty

I’m poor. It’s popular to say that, but I could show you the numbers indicating my household income is just above the point where I qualify for food stamps. We have been pretty much exempt from state and federal taxes for quite a few years based on our low income. That’s the facts.

It’s not a complaint.

It is the sum total consequences of choices we have made, and we have no regrets in that sense. As a Christian Mystic I place material possessions far, far down the scale of priorities. Tweak of few circumstances and I might be wealthy, but those tweaks are not in my reach.

Sure, I could, in theory, choose to do things which would make for a much better income. Those choices would come at a high cost spiritually, though. Nothing about this makes poverty or any other suffering particularly holy and righteous. Suffering and sorrow are the default for human existence in this world. Sometimes you escape it in ways and places, and for various durations, but sorrow is the norm. Suffering is the legitimate condition of fallen humanity, and the only virtue attached to it is our response. My response has been granting God the things He demands of me, and that includes all those things, so far, which would raise my income.

So you say you serve Him, too, and no such poverty strikes your home? How nice. Bless His Name. We are all appointed for different things, and your appointments could well include material prosperity. I won’t argue against that, of course. I have other blessings for which I would not trade all your wealth and a lot more beside that. Sure, I would be glad for more stuff, but not at the cost of changing certain things I have voluntarily resigned to God. There was a time when I was willing to compromise, but no more. I can’t afford to it now. But I have no complaint nor envy for your prosperity.

My wife isn’t a writer, so you’ll have to take my word for it: She knows beyond all doubt the only way she’ll see more wealth is to leave me. Again, that is the situation for now, and has been quite some time. Now, that would be a gamble, of course, since it might make things worse for her, but that’s not the point. I’m not being a hard-head and making her suffer. Were she to want me gone, I would pack a bag right now. There are no chains on her. There most certainly are serious restrictions on my soul. At the cost of even worse suffering, I would not change course. Could not, if you will. This she knows, and chooses to remain in the covenant. I can’t say how glad I am of that, having just passed our 32nd anniversary.

So I don’t even claim to be particularly noble about this, because I’ve learned to fear the other options. They hurt in ways mere poverty could not. I would be dead by now, I assure you, had things gone different. Not that I fear for my life much, but it would do little to bless my family if I were to commit suicide, and that would certainly have been the result had I taken a different route. I came too close to it, as it was. No, I’m a chicken. Pain hurts me. Frankly, this is the path of least resistance, if you will.

On the other hand, the certitude with which I operate is greater than the existence of the universe itself. That is what Christian Mysticism is all about, and poverty is just a circumstance, as is death and a lot of other things. The Realm of the Spirit is more real than reality.